I had a sudden flash of insight into why some children are such finicky eaters. It’s consistency. Modern food is too consistent.
Kids are dubious about new tastes. For good reason – they are born into a world that consists mostly of things you shouldn’t put in your mouth. The corollary though is that once they’ve tried something a few times and found it to be safe, they become keen on that.
That’s not a problem with home-made food. Even cooked to the same recipe by the same person, even when prepared by an expert chef, flavour varies. Personally I’ve never cooked the same meal twice. Hell, my spaghetti sauce rarely comes out the same colour. Not so with prepared foods. To encourage customer loyalty, the inevitable inconsistencies of the natural flavours are drowned out by simpler artificial ones. The only remarkable change in the taste of branded food for the last few decades was when US bottlers of soft drinks switched from cane to corn syrup, and merely swapping between minor variants on the theme of pure sugar almost caused war.
The upshot is that more and more now kids don’t develop a tolerance for variation, and so a broader flavour palette. Instead they become convinced that only certain tightly-defined tastes are tolerable.
This occurred to me today because I bought a ginger cake. It’s a nice ginger cake. You can really taste ginger, which is good in my book. It’s moist and sweet and very traditional. By most objective criteria, I’d be willing to claim that this was an excellent – even an ideal – ginger cake.
But it ain’t a McVitie’s Jamaica Ginger Cake.
Reader, I was that child.
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7 replies on “Just Like Mamma Used To Buy”
Five thousand kind of potatoes still used in Peru. They still eat wild potatoes. Dipped in clay so the toxins in the wild varieties don’t upset the stomach. Muddy taters, yum.
Like kaolin in the well-known diarrhoea treatment? I’ve often wondered how that works. Probably doesn’t form a ceramic coating on the colon.
Sounds different. In the case of potatoes the clay binds itself to the toxins.
Apparently humans picked it up by observing wild llamas licking dirt before eating the wild potatoes. Although since there is no official record of this I like to believe us humans started licking dirt first and the llamas observed us instead.
I just read this about a week ago so that’s the extent of my knowledge on the topic.
I have the vague impression that that’s what the kaolin clay in the kaolin and morphine remedy does too – bind to the toxin.
The morphine is there just so’s you don’t mind having diarrhoea.
That “other kind of ginger” looks like galangal to me.
Though I believe it prefers to be called “light auburn”.